meetin' Leeland

I forgot to look at my schedule before driving in to work this morning. This is unfortunate because I had scheduled to have today off. On the bright side, I got an e-mail about getting a Leeland interview done, so it was good that I was there to confirm a time.

Leeland Mooring was kind enough to call me while the band rushed to the airport in a van in Colorado. We had a nice 20-minute chat while I asked several interview questions. Since he called at 5:30, I had given him my cell phone number since I wouldn't be at work that late. I had him on speaker phone and was holding my phone above my voice recorder. This didn't make for the greatest quality recording, but it worked.

There's always this long 1-2 minutes of tension and high stress after an interview is over during which I'm stopping the recording and putting it into my computer. I'm always afraid I'm going to press a wrong button and lose the whole thing. I made copies of the file and transcribed it. I will now turn a 2,000-word transcript into a 450-word article. Like magic.

It helped that I wrote my Brandon Heath article today because I knew what kind of questions I should have asked to help make the article better. Since Leeland started songwriting at age 11, it's easier to relate him to preteens than a 30-year-old Brandon Heath.

We've got a nice thunderstorm rolling through right now. I like it. Tomorrow Kennan (another intern) and I are going downtown to be tourist-y. I hope to hunt down some Nashville postcards, and I have a half loaf of bread that's a month old -- we'll go to Centennial Park and feed the ducks!

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